Death and the maiden: how funerals rewrite history

When Jim Morisson observed that "Death makes angels of us all" on his seminal album 'An American Prayer', it is unlikely that he had either Margaret Thatcher or Dom Mintoff in mind. Yet the words are remarkably apt to describe how the 'truth' about political leaders tends to be spectacularly forgotten - sometimes rewritten altogether - almost immediately after their deaths.

A textbook demonstration of this truism was provided in the UK earlier this week: when the death of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, 87, exposed a veritable chasm between the 'official' reactions as reported in the mainstream media... and the reaction at street level, where sizeable crowds gathered to celebrate her final passing to the tune of 'Ding-Dong the Witch is Dead' (from the Wizard of Oz).

Though 23 years have elapsed since Thatcher was ousted by her own Cabinet in 1990, it is clear from the general reaction that the bitterness and hurt caused by many of her more controversial policies - her epochal stand-off with the coalminers' union in 1984, and a series of spending cuts that earned her the nickname 'The Milk Snatcher' (to name but two) - are still very deeply felt.

Yet the mainstream media limited their response mainly to 'official' obituaries and tributes that by and large tended to gloss over the sheer divisiveness of her political legacy.

Perhaps the most eloquent expression of the minority view (at least among politicians) came courtesy of former actress (now MP) Glenda Jackson.

Jackson struck a discordant note in the House of Commons with her appraisal of the "heinous social, economic and spiritual damage" wreaked by Thatcher between 1979 and 1990.

She later defended her criticism of the 'Iron Lady' as a defence of history itself: "I spoke up because history has been rewritten over the past week. I lived through the Thatcher period. I know what it was like. I know what it was like for my constituents. The reality bore no resemblance to what's being presented..."

Those words will almost certainly strike a chord with many here in Malta who expressed similar reservations at the State funeral given to former Prime Minister Dom Mintoff last August... even though, at a glance, it is difficult to imagine two more forcefully disparate political icons as Mintoff and Maggie.

An old-school Socialist who consciously modelled himself on Fidel Castro and Gamal Abdul Nasser, Mintoff arguably represented the clean opposite of Thatcherism in his own day (in fact his relations with the British PM were notoriously icy: Thatcher had memorably refused to shake his hand upon the closure of the British naval base in 1979).

Nonetheless, their diverse political legacy proved equally divisive in the long term. Memories of Mintoff were likewise immediately polarised between those who credit him with dragging Malta kicking and screaming out of the Middle Ages; and those who still hold the Labour Party's erstwhile 'salvatur' responsible for instilling a disproportionate degree of class hatred and division.

Significantly, in both cases the former antagonists of the deceased (with few exceptions, including Glenda Jackson) proved willing to bury the hatchet along with the former object of their hatred or mistrust. So with Mintoff safely dead and buried, his former political adversary Eddie Fenech Adami could unflinchingly predict that "history will judge Mintoff favourably", and that "his good outweighed his bad".

Elsewhere, the Catholic Church, which once literally demonised Mintoff on posters in the 1960s - and which denied him sacraments for nine whole years - saw no contradiction in celebrating his funeral mass, praesente cadavere, at St John's Co-Cathedral.

Having said that, the two scenarios differ in one important respect. While historical revisionism of Margaret Thatcher is likely to be enforced through the full might of the British army - to be deployed at her funeral on Wednesday for fear that the event may be hijacked by demonstrations - Mintoff's positive reappraisal did not need to be guaranteed through the use of force or any other means.

Perhaps because so much of the underlying causes of Malta's old political divide are simply no longer visible on the surface - the extreme disparity of wealth of the 1950s, for instance, the policies which targeted private enterprise in the 1970s... or for that matter the Malta shipyards, once the hotbed of so much Socialist angst - even the most dedicated anti-Mintoffians (with very few exceptions) proved willing to close an eye at the many fanciful reinventions of the man and his legacy immediately after his passing.

Not so Margaret Thatcher, in whose case efforts in this direction were thwarted by many who stepped forward to 'correct' history as it was being written.

From this perspective, another truism seems to emerge. Perhaps the reluctance of her myriad critics to forgive Margaret Thatcher her excesses after her death may be viewed as evidence that - unlike Thatcher herself - the root cause of their resentment remains very much alive in the UK today.